Improved LSTM Based on Attention Mechanism for Short-term Traffic Flow Prediction

In recent years, various types of Intelligent Transportation Systems(ITSs) have produced a large amount of structured traffic flow data. Using these structured data and deep learning models to predict urban short-term traffic flow is an important focus of current research. In order to solve the problem of low accuracy of Long-Short Term Memory(LSTM) model in urban traffic flow prediction, this paper proposes an LSTM model based on attention mechanism. The proposed model can learn the importance of each past value to the current value from the long sequence of traffic data at the past moment, which makes it possible to extract more valuable features. Constructed a dataset using the traffic data in the core section of Wuhan for experiments, and the performance of the improved model is compared with the original LSTM model. The results show that when the input data sequence increases from 16 to 64, the MAPE of our proposed model is reduced by 3.76%, while the MAPE of the LSTM model is reduced by 1.51%, which proves the effectiveness of our proposed method.